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Karim
"By day", "by night", "at day" "at night". Hello, dear users of this wonderful platform! Could somebody help me to understand the difference between these words a little bit better, please? As far as I know, when we want to sound more dramatic, we should use "by night" and not "at night". Just compare. "The tiger hunts by night". Just look at this tiger. How strong he is! How wise and patient he is! How patiently he's waiting for his victim. And: "The tiger hunts at night". This tiger just hunts at night. Nothing special, just a regular thing. So, "The tiger hunts by night" sounds more dramatic than "The tiger hunts at night." Also, the expression "by night" is typically used to contrast someone's nighttime activities to their daytime activities, especially when the nighttime activities are unusual or unexpected. We can see it very frequently in the construction "X by day", and "Y by night". Example: He's just a regular clerk who does his boring office work by day, but he's a superhero who saves this world from the power of evil by night. We don't expect him to do heroic deeds, so we say "by night" to compare his unusual activities to usual ones. Returning to my previous example, to say that an animal hunts by night we use the "by night" expression because we normally think of daytime as the time where animals should be most active, based on our own experience and we expect them to hunt. But, "at night" is more dramatic. Correct me if necessary, please and add more rules for using these expressions. I'd love to know whether there are some I don't know yet. Thank you for reading this post, and have a productive day!
Jun 30, 2022 4:17 PM
Answers · 2
1
I really enjoyed this interesting article of yours! I’d say that you've already written more about the difference between “at night” and “by night” than any English learner needs to know, and you’ve explained it well. As far as “at day” — that expression doesn’t really exist. We could say “during the day(time).
June 30, 2022
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